Teleconferencing may involve the exchange of audio, video, and other media streams across a plurality of remote persons connected to a communication network through an endpoint device such as a telephone. With the extension of teleconferencing into endpoint devices capable of more sophisticated interactions such as personal computers, teleconferencing presently can include features such as text chat and the sharing of onscreen displays. These capabilities can be seen in existing commercial teleconferencing systems such as Cisco's WebEx and Microsoft's Live Meeting software.
Such existing teleconferencing systems allow a single participant to be the presenter, able to administer and direct the machinations of the other participants. In particular, a media stream that requires a high level of network bandwidth such as motion video will traditionally only be broadcasted by the presenter. This limitation is imposed to conserve network and processor resources as multi-point video teleconferencing systems in which a plurality of endpoint devices all send a high bandwidth video stream to all other endpoint devices within the teleconference creates an exponential N×N transmission, reception, and processing requirement for each such device.
The ability to do screen sharing, in which the video display of a single participant is mirrored onto the video displays of other participants, is limited to the presenter. Similarly, most of the functions that direct attention to a particular document are controlled by the presenter. The existing top-down model of presentation significantly reduces the independence of non-presenter participants relative to their usage of their endpoint device outside of teleconferencing and potentially their contribution to the teleconference.
A particular feature of some teleconferencing systems is co-browsing, which provides teleconference participants with the ability to navigate and interact with hypertext webpages in a synchronized manner. As the hypertext content on the World Wide Web has become more complex and interactive, synchronizing the navigation and interaction between participants has likewise become more difficult. As a result, current teleconferencing systems supporting co-browsing do so through either extension of their screen sharing mechanism or by plug-ins to existing web browsers which delegate basic navigation commands such as the loading of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Synchronization of co-browsing is especially hindered by differencing between client browsers including their rendering engines and even their version within a single product line.
Existing teleconferencing systems do not allow participants to easily migrate between teleconferences or to derive new teleconferences from existing ones due to their transient data retention. Participants are specific to particular teleconferences and may not be easily merged or otherwise modified.
The future utility of current teleconferencing systems is further limited by the ephemerality of both the teleconference and their participants' actions. Upon the conclusion of a teleconference, only partial or no data is retained as a record of the actions within the teleconference. In particular, the data collected from a teleconference is not available as the subject of a future teleconference through a formal representation nor are participants' relation to formal representations analyzed across multiple teleconferences.